Another Session of Wasters, the B/X / OSE turned Cyberpunk RPG.

While Snips had declared the mission over, Whispa was not yet done with the Frog Castle of Doom. She gathered the gang: Bruno, Kendal and the fresh Hacker girl Snake Eyes, the Sentinels Royston and Willard, and also Messy’s old flame, Kathi, and her machine gun toting combat bot (Classic Kathi-move, naming him: “Bot”), to finally make short shrift of the last remaining frog-men and horn-dogs. Kendal and Royston were Frog-veterans already, for the others the wet place was uncharted territory.

They gathered the conquered underwater weapons, took some bots like Costa, Stabby and Roger, and hired Shimizu “Merlin” Daiki, an Engineer, Tolya Markov, a power armor wearing sentinel, and Iwai Touma, a Sneak. And then they were off to take another, a final shot, at clearing that old facility for its new owners.

Kathi’s Story

On the trip there, Kathi spoke up and explained to them all who she was. After losing Messy — “the only person to ever show true concern for my well-being” — she felt pretty lonely. She told the whole story, including how Messy had agreed to let her rid in him, and how she had saved his life, up to how she came to inhabit her current body, and that the former gang-girl who had been born in it had been erased by the conflict of two minds in one host. And that human bodies or weak machines would all fail after a short while with her, as her mind burned them out. Which was why she longed to go back to that underground facility she came from — to conquer Xixi and take over him; her former boss and tormentor. That was quite the bomb, and more than a few of the team felt a bit uneasy sitting too close to someone who might just sidle over and inhabit their body next. Whispa, while outwardly stoic, texted the rest of the teams her emotions: “Fucking hell!“

But wasters accept a lot, so they also bent their minds around that. And moved at the frogs.

Operation: Frog

The team observed four of the classic frog guards. They moved in, climbed the roof, and eliminated them. However, Mighty Tolya in his power armor, drew the short stick: He missed with his shots in both rounds he came up, then a horndog attacked and ripped his leg off in one single attack. Power armor or not: that is a career-ender.

Then took the north tower. Another throne, like in the south tower, but a weaker ruler, one who fell quickly under the attack of the wasters. Not alone, though: Fate found Roger’s important circuits, and the brave android was irreparably damaged. A good AI, one more tragic loss to the frog menace.

Seeing their boss fall, the frog minions fled, and the team followed, watching them take a plunge under water, into the basement.

Mopping up

The hackers, Kathi and Snake Eyes, had so far remained outside the castle, working through their bot control. But now they followed inside, and the Sentinels and they hacked into the system once more to make sure nothing was overlooked. Good that they did: They managed to eliminate that dangerous security program and deactivated another laser grid.

The team also grabbed another of those gold logos, like they had done in the south tower before. Then they went at the generator room and mowed down the horndogs there, the bunch that had eaten Wyndham.

Going Under

And that was it: The oxygen-part of Castle Frogula was cleansed. Now it was time to bring out the watertight guns.

But that is for another session.

Links

• Wasters
• The Snips Saga

Credits

Top picture: Photo by Zach Reiner on Unsplash